utopia

I just finished reading The Giver. While I'm sure many people have probably read this book in a couple of hours, I'm a slow reader and don't have a whole lot of free time so it took me 3 days, but it was worth it. I can't remember whether I ever read this book in school or not, but I really enjoyed reading it. As I read about Jonas' community and the utopia they created for themselves, it got me thinking about whether or not I would enjoy living in a society like that. While it would be nice to be in a society where you are guaranteed to live in peace for your entire live and where your meals were brought to you every day and you never had to cook (unless you were assigned to be a nutrition specialist), I can't think of any other advantages to living in such a state. I can't imagine not having the ability to ever make any choices and not having the capacity to love. These are two things that I completely take for granted because I have never known what it was like to have choices to make and I have always had people around whom I have loved. The more I thought about this, the more I came to understand that this was the adversary's plan. He would make it so that we all lived a meaningless existence so that we could all return to the presence of our Heavenly Father without pain or trials. But without those things, life would be utterly meaningless.